Technical Indicator Series

by Mustapha Mekhatria

Technical Indicators, like annotations, are powerful tools that help to understand charts and make decisions with ease. The mathematical algorithms use the existing data to indicate trends, events, etc. and help to set up boundaries for strategies and to look for patterns.

Technical indicators require the indicators/indicators.js main module. The main module includes SMA (Simple Moving Average). Each technical indicator, except the SMA, is a separate module and should be loaded after the main module. A full list of supported technical indicators:

Technical indicators modules are implemented as series, that means almost all of the default options for series are available. The main option, which needs to be set for an indicator, is series.linkedTo. That option binds an indicator to a series: an indicator will use series.data for all calculations, even when the dataset is changing (e.g. by series.addPoint()). Additionally, each indicator has its own list of parameters, available under params options, which allows easy customisation (e.g. params.period, params.algorithm).

There are no limitations to the number of technical indicators that can be bound to one main series. The following example creates a chart with four series: one main, two SMA, and one EMA:

yAxis bindigs

Some technical indicators (Bollinger Bands, EMA, Ichimoku Kinko Hyo, Pivot Points, Price Envelopes, PSAR, SMA, VbP, VWAP, WMA, Zig Zag) can be placed on the same yAxis as the main series. However, other indicators (A/D, ATR, CCI, CMF, MACD, MFI, Momentum, RoC, RSI, Stochastic) should use a separate yAxis. This is caused by values calculated by algorithms: yAxis extremes for the main series can be <250, 255> but for the Stochastic technical indicator, values are within <0, 100> extremes. A technical indicator can be placed on a separate yAxis as any other series: